Interview: Errol Morris

Nearly five years have passed since Errol Morris’ Academy Award winning documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It is perhaps fitting that he should follow up that documentary, which featured the former Secretary of Defense’s misgivings and regrets about the Vietnam War, with Standard Operating Procedure, featuring first person accounts from the participants of the Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, the site of the prisoner abuse scandal. He was intrigued by the pictures that were printed all over the world showing prisoners in various states of what appeared to be torture. He was surprised to learn that the most infamous picture—a man with a hood over his head, standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers—was not ruled torture but Standard Operating Procedure. It took Morris and his staff months to convince the participants to sit for interviews. He received candid, often perplexing, accounts of what these soldiers saw and why they did nothing to stop it. Once again, Morris employed the use of the “Interrotron” interview technique, which he and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person’s face is then projected onto the lens of the other’s camera. So instead of looking at a black lens, the subject is looking at a face. Morris says this technique is important because of the eye contact that the subject then has with the audience. Although SOP received the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival recently, Morris says he was irritated by the press’ incessant focus on his use of re-enactments. Memory, he says, is a re-enactment and in order to tell the story, one must put the pieces of the puzzle together with the use of interviews, evidence and re-enactments. Nonetheless, he hopes his documentary opens the door to more investigations surrounding the events of 2003 in the Iraqi prison.

How did the Europeans receive this documentary?

One thing that surprises me is that this issue with re-enactments comes up again. It has been 20 years since I made The Thin Blue Line. At the time it came out there was a lot of questions about the use of re-enactments. It puzzles me that people have a problem with my use of re-enactment materials. If you are giving a retrospective account of anything you are re-enacting it. If you are recording something as it’s happening, that is one thing. But what are you supposed to do if you are giving a retrospective account of something that happened in the past? Particularly because our knowledge of the past is fragmentary—it comes from bits and pieces of evidence that we then assemble into some kind of story. It’s true in print journalism and it’s true in documentary. I’m even fond of pointing out one simple, often ignored, fact that consciousness itself is a re-enactment. We are re-enacting reality inside of our skulls. There is a deep illusion that somehow the brain is a reality recorder it assembles the world from bits and pieces of evidence…This is not by way of trying to lie to the audience but to engage the audience into the puzzle of what is real.

How do you think Americans will receive it?

I don’t know. I really do not know. We are talking about a story that regardless of what I think about it, is incredibly charged politically. Having said that I did not make it primarily as a political document. I was curious about something. I was investigating something. I was interested in the mystery of these pictures. What do they mean what do they represent what do they depict. They give you little bits and pieces of reality. They ask you to stand back and look and to reflect on it.

Is this in any way a follow up to the Fog of War—sort of cataloguing and memorializing America’s infamous wars?

I suppose in some way yes. But I take it on a simpler level—who are these people? Why were the photographs taken? Do the photos tell us everything we need to know about Abu Ghraib and do the photographs discourage us from looking any further?

How did you convince these players to give you interviews?

With difficulty. It’s always difficult making a film that depends on real people. Particularly when you are in investigative mode. It was like The Thin Blue Line in that I needed an array of characters to make it work. You hope that you get the material that you need in order to create a story. In a way it’s like rolling dice.

What did you say to persuade them?

I don’t have one stock line. It’s a process of talking to people and convincing them to talk to you. I have told everybody about my feelings that the entire story is not in the photographs. It’s my attempt to reach beyond the photographs. I think the story is a mixture of all kinds of evidence. Restrospective accounts. Letters, documents. All the evidence you can bring to bear in understanding the past.

In this election year, do you think your documentary will resonate in any particular way with voters—to sway them one way or another?

I don’t know. That is not my intention for making the movie

Have any of the candidates seen it?

No, not to my knowledge. I would love for the film to be widely seen here and around the world. I hope that not just the movie but the book and the investigation that I have done, which is 150 plus hours of interviews. Documents, transcripts, letters photographs, diaries. At some point I hope to create an archive and put all of this material on line. I hope it forces people to demand a more thorough investigation of what happened at Abu Ghraib.

Did you request an interview with [Coalition Forces Commander] Gen. [Ricardo S.] Sanchez and [Brigade Commader] Col. [Thomas M.] Pappas?

We requested an interview with Col. Pappas. We may or may not have with Sanchez. They were perfunctory turned down. I don’t think it’s relevant to this particular film or the story is this idea that this story is about the chain of command. But that is certainly not true. In a certain way we all have these theories, people love theories to explain away evil or human behavior. But the theories don’t interest me terribly much. What does interest me is to tell a story that is unexpected and real. I have said that the movie is like a cake with three ingredients. All of which are important: the re-enactments, the photographs, and the retrospective accounts. The fourth ingredient is Sabrina’s [one of the soldier’s] letters. They are not retrospective. They were written at the same time the photographs were taken. Not every soldier thought the same thing. They were all different and all interesting and all unique. This is an attempt to recover the people.

Were you surprised that so many of the interrogation techniques were ruled Standard Operating Procedure?

Of course it surprised me.

You were of age during the Vietnam War but were you ever in the military? Or were you drafted?

I was a student so I got a student deferment. I was never in the military.

Do you think you would view this issue of SOP differently if you had been in the military— that in war different rules apply?

Well, then you enter an Alice in Wonderland kind of world of what is a criminal act and what is Standard Operating Procedure? It’s not just that it’s considered SOP, it’s also about the distinctions that are being made.

Why is one thing ruled one way and another action ruled differently?

Like whether or not water boarding is torture? The issue is not just about torture. I’m not saying it’s not an issue. But it’s not just about torture. We are talking about criminality on so many diverse levels. I am amazed when I read there is no new evidence in [SOP]. Well, give me time. Even in the movie, no one knows that all the evidence was destroyed. This is a prison where nearly 10,000 prisoners were kept in inadequate conditions. It’s not the kind of movie that points with a red arrow that says new evidence, new evidence. As an American, you watch this documentary with horror and shame...

I didn’t want to make another quasi-political documentary after The Fog of War but I felt compelled to do something because of this horrendous feeling of hopelessness; of all this stuff going on around you and doing nothing about it; saying nothing. I don’t know how much I have done, but I have done a little bit. One of the jokes of course is that [the government] keeps saying we are following the Geneva Conventions. Everything at Abu Ghraib was a violation of Geneva. Holding people’s families, arresting without cause and giving them no idea of a release date, kidnapping children to get information about the families. Torture in a certain way also means that you are not looking at Abu Ghraib as a microcosm of Iraq. You get in some crazy discussion about what constitutes torture. What is the semantic discussion about kidnapping people’s children?

If you kidnap people’s children and you don’t torture them, that is ok? Where is any of this ok? In some kind of degraded moral universe where nothing makes sense anymore.

In the documentary, you play with images, and one of the lasting thoughts is that images are factual, but they can also be deceiving...can you elaborate on that?

The way I like to describe it is that they serve as an expose and a cover-up. One of the soldiers who gets blood on his uniform from a prisoner, to me, stands for all Americans when he says ‘I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t there. I didn’t kill the guy.’ But then he tells you there was a spot of blood on his shirt. Well, you are involved in this…as Americans we all have that drop of blood on our clothing.